Setting Relativity to Stop Formatting Email .png Files Being Stripped Out As Attachments

It's very common to come across images which were embedded in one email message and have become stripped out and added as attachments to a message in a later part of the same thread.

These may have been logos used in the signature block for the initial email or other formatting details.

The attachments can be added as additional family members, but they contain content which will not need to be reviewed:

Attorneys will be annoyed to have to review documents without any meaningful content.

Keep in mind that a Relativity admin can be asked to set a processing profile for a production so that embedded images or objects are not stripped from emails or PowerPoint presentations, even when other children are set to be extracted.

If the options for 'MS Office embedded images'; or 'Email inline images' are checked off, image files such as .jpg, .bmp, or .png files will not be published as separate documents in the review set, nor will they be OCRed or have their text extracted. The 'MS Office embedded objects' option will prevent files embedded inside MS Office files (such as a PDF in a Word document) from being added as new documents or being OCRed or made subject to the text extraction process.

How embedded objects are handled can vary based on many factors. For example, an Excel file that is pasted into a Word document may be stored as both the spreadsheet and as an .emf image of the active worksheet.

Of course, an image embedded in an email may also have substantive content - such as a bar graph or screen grab of another document.

The 'Roll up image text' radio button will add the text of the attachment [assuming OCR is enabled] to the end of the searchable text for the parent document, after a dotted line listing the name of the image or object.

Using the 'Roll up image text' option can cut down the number of files in the workspace and significantly reduce costs.

Physical destruction of a laptop hard drive

Tonight I spent some time destroying two hard drives for an old laptop that I no longer use. Both were hard disk drives. I had previously backed up the data on the hard drives, and then wiped the drives, but I wanted to take the additional step of making whatever remained on them physically impossible to access.

After wiping the drives, I tried to recover data from them using recovery tools included with the Hiren BootCD (see here), just to confirm the wiping software had been effective.

The first step was to remove the battery, so any chance of an electric shock could be eliminated. Next using a precision screwdriver, I removed the covers for the two drives in the laptop, which were both secured inside with metal braces, which also had to be removed.

The drives each had a controller board on one side, and a metal plate on the opposite side.

I did not have the right tools to unscrew the metal plate, so I drilled through each drive from the side with the controller board.

Drilling one hole took several minutes with a no-frills Black & Decker drill. While I managed to put two deep holes in each drive, I was not able to penetrate past the metal plate case on the opposite side.

A lot of people make the mistake of ending their effort to physically destroy a drive at this point. However, it is possible for the platters in the HDDs to still be intact after holes like these have been drilled. See for example this video posted by @cfldriven in which he demonstrates how drives with large drill holes . . .

. . . still have platters from which data can be recovered:

I couldn't pry off the metal plate to reveal the platters on my drives, but I was able to open up the holes I drilled further with a screwdriver and confirm that the platters had been smashed.

It was possible to hear the pieces rattling around inside, and several small broken shards spilled out of the case.

Of course, the more common solid state drives used in most laptops manufactured in recent years don't have platters, and drilling several holes in them may leave some of the chips on which they store data undamaged.

Javascript to redact highlighted text in Adobe Acrobat

If you have a set of PDFs which attorneys have highlighted to show which excerpts in the documents they want to be redacted, you can run a Javascript in Adobe Acrobat to convert the highlighted text to redactions.

Follow these steps:

1. In Acrobat, under Tools, open the 'Action Wizard'.

2. Select 'New Action'

   
   

   

. . . and then add the 'Execute JavaScript' tool. Be sure to uncheck 'Prompt User'

3. Click on 'Specify Settings' and then add the below script into the Editor:

this.syncAnnotScan();

var annots = this.getAnnots();

if (annots != null) {

    for (var i in annots) {

        var annot = annots[i];

        if (annot.type == "Highlight") {

                                    annot.type = "Redact";

                                    annot.fillColor = color.black

                        }

    }

}

this.applyRedactions();

4. Next, add a command in the action to save the file.

5. Under the Save settings, enter a suffix for the new file that will be saved:

   

   
   

6. Name and save the new action:

6. When you run the action

. . . it will prompt you to select multiple files

This script will redact highlighting of different colors - not just yellow, but pink, blue, green, or whatever color has been used.

Note that if other text in the PDF has been marked for redaction:

. . . this script will apply those redactions.